Now that I've changed to 13.10, I can't get a grub menu. I found this out the hard way when something about installing then removing KDE plasma desktop made it so ubuntu stopped booting between the start screen and the login. I had to make a fresh install. Now that I have, I've tried again to get a grub menu. Holding down shift does not work. Here is what my /etc/defaults/grub
file had on fresh install:
# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
# info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"
# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console
# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true
# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"
Hypothetically, this should make grub menu visible for 10 seconds (GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
). It is not. It also doesn't even take 10 seconds for my computer to go from starting grub to the login screen. I tried changing to
...
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
...
which did cause a 5 second countdown to be displayed, but hitting shift, once again had no effect.
What's going on?